I'm a multiple-time entrepreneur, living and working in the heart of Silicon Valley for the past quarter century. Currently, I spend most of my time working on a new startup in the online education arena. I've got a BA in political science and an MBA from Stanford. Having been around technology and business on the leading edge, I write mostly about what's new and what's coming for companies and the country. You can find me on Facebook, Twitter and Google+ You can e-mail me at forbes_at_rogodotnet

'Don't Be Evil': Google Uses Its Power Justly, But We Should All Be Afraid

There aren’t going to be many complaints that Google turned in a suspected child pornographer. And really, why should there be? If the allegations prove true, John Henry Skillern was committing a crime and should face justice. Google is just a good samaritan, using its technology to scan our emails and helping law enforcement make the world a better place. The rest of us law-abiding citizens have nothing to fear and we can blissfully thank the good folks of Mountain View for their contributions.

If the above paragraph didn’t terrify you just a little, please take what follows with respect: It should. Google has been scanning Gmail since its inception more than a decade ago, but the purposes have been very narrow: to filter out spam and to attempt to display targeted ads alongside the mail you’re reading mostly. At some point in the more recent past, it decided it could do more.

The company has — to its credit — been involved for a long while in the battle against child exploitation online. For at least the past 8 years, it has worked to slow or stop the distribution of pornographic images of minors through technological solutions. In 2008, it began using a technique called “hashing” to code known images so that it could look for them across the web and presumably avoid indexing them.

“Each child sexual abuse image is given a unique digital fingerprint, which enables our systems to identify those pictures, including in Gmail,” it told the New York Times in an email. When did it start? It doesn’t say. But Google would like you to be reassured. “It is important to remember that we only use this technology to identify child sexual abuse imagery, not other email content that could be associated with criminal activity (for example using email to plot a burglary).”

So today, if you’re plotting a burglary, feel free to use Gmail. But keep in mind that tomorrow, things might change. Perhaps Google will decide that the collection of taxes is very important to the operation of a sound republic and start passing emails onto the IRS that discuss “aggressive accounting.” Or perhaps it will come to conclude that its efforts in big data are generally applicable to predicting crime and just start forwarding a series of anonymous tips to law enforcement about possible domestic violence, embezzling or anything that might vaguely resemble a terrorist plot.

In some perfect, benevolent world this might even be great for society. But as anyone who saw Minority Report back in 2002 can attest, it can easily all go haywire. For a cautionary tale, just look at Gmail today. Despite all of Google’s success in combating spam, it still routinely allows some to filter through into our inboxes. I got a version of the Nigerian scam just the other day, although this one used Syria instead. That same day, the spam filter inadvertently pilfered a legitimate email from my bank that I only caught because I was deleting the scam mail.

For these reasons, perhaps, we can take some solace in the fact Google isn’t likely to start passing along news of our bad behavior anytime soon. But what we can’t do is trust that it will keep our secrets safe forever. In a lawsuit over Gmail practices, the company made crystal clear it believes its right to scan your email has few limits. Because it needs to filter viruses, search your inbox, sort your email, et al., it’s always scanning, Google says. And you’ve agreed to this anyway as part of the “it’s free, so long as we can send you advertising” tradeoff.

But Google’s reasoning there raises a question we should all be asking ourselves: Is it worth it? The company notes in the lawsuit that it recently amended its privacy policy and as a condition of continuing to use Gmail, the plaintiffs accepted the changes. Facebook did something similarly with its Messenger app, which replaces the messaging functionality that has been built into its mobile client. Accept the terms or lose Facebook messaging.

What terms? “Allows the app to record audio with microphone … at any time without your confirmation. Allows the app to take pictures and videos with the camera … at any time without your confirmation. Allows the app to read you phone’s call log, including data about incoming and outgoing calls.” Those are just a few of the choice ones millions of you have now agreed to. Why Facebook even needs most of these is beyond comprehension, but it now has them.

Which brings us back to Google. There is little to stop it from requiring the roughly 500 million Gmail users to accept whatever it decides to do next. A change like: “We may, from time to time, pass along information about suspected criminal behavior to law enforcement officials.” In a post-Edward Snowden world, it should be apparent to most people that unfettered access to personal information puts us on a slippery slope.

Sadly, it isn’t. On my local news last night, the indifference was apparent. “I don’t have anything to hide, so I don’t really care,” a young woman said upon hearing about Google’s email scanning. Perhaps she’s right until she has a child and sends an innocent picture of it to a relative. Maybe by then a more aggressive version of the technology will mistakenly see that as pornography. (Remember, Google still can’t reliably detect spam with anything near 100% accuracy.)

Or perhaps as it grows more powerful in the marketplace, Google will cut a deal with the government for lighter antitrust regulation in exchange for more information about the possibly illegal activities of users.

To paraphrase Martin Niemöller: First they came for the child pornographers, and you didn’t speak up because you were not a child pornographer. Then they came for the terrorists, and you didn’t care because you were not one of those either. Then they came for the tax evaders and still you were not especially troubled. But when they came for you for daring to question their unchecked authority, “no one was there to speak for you.”

Justice may have been done yesterday. We’ll know once Skillern gets his day in court. But a very dangerous precedent has been set under which a private company has concluded that if technology can solve a problem, it should be unleashed on it. It’s hard not to worry about where that leads.

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It’s amazing how people will let Google — an unelected business enterprise, accountable to no one except its shareholders and driven only by profit — do things that they would absolutely rail against if their elected government were doing them.

Imagine if the federal government were driving around with camera cars taking pictures of homes and businesses along every road in the U.S., or (as in this case) scanning the contents everyone’s email. Google provides useful services by these activities, as might the U.S. government. Yet nobody would tolerate the government doing it, while blissfully accepting Google doing the same thing.

Seriously, take this story of Google identifying a child pornographer as a result of systematically scanning everyone’s email. Now change the word “Google” to “FBI”. Can you imagine the uproar?! “FBI arrests child porn offender thanks to blanket scanning of citizens’ email accounts; sees potential for expanded use of this system to identify criminal activity.” Intolerable, right? But you go for it, Google! Keep scanning and tracking me, even though I have no say in who you are or what you do with my info.

I have a greater concern. What happens when corporations start accepting payment for scanning emails, pictures, etc.? I don’t think it is out of bounds for the MPAA and RIAA to offer to pay Google, Facebook, et. al. for info on pirated content. I think we can not yet imagine how far and where this can go.

This aspect of scanning one’s e-mail seems viable, and Google is taking the appropriate action to filter, or report issues concerning serious matters. There really is no harm in this respect, for Google is not interested in the everyday exchange of information, just scanning those things which are not appropriate. We like Google.

Lousy paraphrase. Rather few of us would regret not having the child pornographers, terrorists and tax evaders around any more to speak for us. But most of us would take the socialists, trade unionists and Jews. (Tea-Party members excepted, of course….)

Thanks for sharing Mark. I am completely on the fence about Google. I do online marketing and SEO for an investment publication company called Wyatt Investment Research. We use Google for EVERYTHING. I use it to optimize articles, to upload videos, to share documents with co-workers, the list goes on. For the most part none of this information is confidential and absolutely none of it is illegal so I am not concerned. But I have to wonder what things could wrongly be distorted. How much does Google have the right to know about my being? As for now, I am not quite sure.

I completely disagree with this article, and this is a great example of the slippery slope fallacy. What does google want with gmail? It’s obviously going to be users. Users are #1, and then advertising to them is #2. Think about the landscape of tech right now with snapchat and whatsapp, etc. These revenue-less companies are being acquired for (or offered) billions of dollars, and what value to have have? Users. It is in Google’s best interests to not drive any users away. That means there would be less people on the platform, and less people to advertise to (not just in gmail, but search, etc).

Where has Google always drawn the line with content? Child pornography has always been something that is obviously not shown by google in image search. This is filtering content! Google has repeatedly worked to remove, and now catch, child pornography.

This is not a slippery slope! Just because Google removes child porn from image search, that does not mean Google will remove more items. This is the same with gmail, just because Google can use algorithms to find people who share large amounts of child pornography does not mean they will do something similar for other subjects.

In Google’s shoes, what would you do? If you had the capability, would you help the police find child pornographers by detecting if a large amount of child porn is emailed by an account? Should Google stop doing this?

It isn’t just the extremes of illegality where google meddles. Google imposes PG content standards on every site using google adverts (so, really, almost every site on the web). It enforces them when someone (anyone) complains about a particular image or page. Sites are obliged to censor themselves, or their user content, if someone draws googles attention to a violation. Publishers dare not object to a warning by google because if over-ruled they can be ejected from the entire adsense program: equivalent to a death sentence online. Google is happy to hide behind safe harbour to protect its own revenue but google holds its client publishers to a far different standard. Another point: in order for google to play policeman on child porn its robots are getting their fingers VERY dirty: they are indexing, downloading, cataloguing, blacklisting and “hashing” child porn pictures and child porn sites. We have apparently happy letting google bots decide what to police and what to ignore. Google has (and is being allowed) latent power beyond imagination. Should their revenue model and constant growth ever be threatened, their shareholders will be almost duty bound to abuse their power to keep the money flowing. I’ll regret ever using google tools and services when that day comes.

Good article, but you fail to convince your main point for 3 reasons. 1st, your arguments that Google will abuse the power is loosely linked. It fails to convince me how Google might uses it’s technology to find harass me, while clearly till now that are helping the authorities. 2nd, the law is simply catching up to modern times. In order to ensure that there is law and order, the authorities have to ensure that people behave “properly” both physically and digitally. 3rd, this technology will help the authorities become very efficient in finding the culprits which can reduce the court time and therefore, save time and tax payers money. Again, this is a good article and I think that readers should keep this in their back of their mind to remain alert about their privacy. Till now, Google doesn’t seem to abuse their powers but with vigilant, and educated public, they won’t. Just think of Xbox One. Xbox One wanted to put 24 hours mandatory online connection, DRM rights, and Kinect and now look at their sales. People refused to buy their product and they lost lot of money to Sony. Both the public and the corporates can use and abuse such technology. “With great power comes great responsibility” (Voltaire).